Chapter 9

When he finally went to bed, he fell into a dream that hovered just beyond the thin cover of wakefulness. He could have sworn that he had been transported to yet another garden of sorts, where pinkish blossoms hung limply on the branches of a bush. He saw cherubs frolicking behind this bush along an emerald expanse of lawn that was both brightly-lit and endless. But the sunlight that doused this field in the brightness had a certain dullness to it that didn’t make the look of the scene all that pleasurable. There was a dullness to the light, as though there was nothing so spectacular about the blossoms that he sat in front of. It seemed that he had been so hardened through years of toil and worry to see this garden as anything other than a mundane, two-dimensional portrait glossed over by a certain depressive tint. He had seen it a thousand times over. But then the sunlight that had bathed the cherubs on the lawn beyond the blossoming bush slowly stretched nearer to him, until suddenly this same sunlight also bathed the pinkish blossoms hanging limply from their branches, causing them to strengthen and bloom in the light right in front of him. Suddenly the sunlight didn’t seem so dull anymore, as there was something magical that came with the light. It had a golden aura to it, as though it were a heavenly and more divine light that had arrived even at the most remote corners of Charlie’s perception.

And from a sunlight that was once dull, and from a garden that had been mired in dullness, the garden soon brushed against an aesthetic beauty that was worthy of the highest art. Charlie, within the dream, thought that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but out of this depressiveness and ordinariness came a rich and translucent light that could have only been born from divine intervention. And Charlie was so suddenly and utterly transfixed by witnessing this beauty for the first time, a beauty so profound and aesthetically pleasing that he felt both privileged and honored to be shown the difference between the condition that had been drummed into him through years of disappointment and failure and now this divine, aesthetic light of the scene unfolding right in front of him. It was as though divinity alone had adjusted his sight just to show him such a difference between heaven and earth.

But just as it dawned on him that he was being shown such a difference, the sky quickly darkened as a low cloud blocked out the sun. It grew cold all of a sudden, and Charlie hugged himself to stave off the chill that whipped through the garden. The cherubs playing beyond the bush stopped their frolicking and approached Charlie Zero as he sat there wondering where the precious sunlight had gone. The cherubs faces that were once smiling soon frowned, their expressions transmogrifying into rude and angry faces that now grew sharp fangs ready to cut him. Their fingers and toes grew claws, and soon they resembled blood-thirsty vampires ready to devour him. The sky suddenly turned to black, and all around him he heard the shrieks, screeches, and cries of the cherubs who hissed all around him in the darkness like hungry snakes ready to sink their fangs deep into him. And what’s more, Charlie felt himself turning into a snake himself, as the sudden urge to bite down hard into something found him bruxing in his sleep.

He awoke with a start as the morning sunlight filtered in through the apartment windows and revealed how messy and unkempt his room had become. He felt like biting into anything he could find—a mouth guard, perhaps, or the flesh of someone’s forearm—anything that could be put into his mouth. He got up and rushed to the fridge where he found a half-eaten sandwich from the night before. Voraciously, he bit into the sandwich and hungrily scarfed it down. He shoved the entire thing into his mouth just to feel the edges of his teeth bite down into the soft of the bread and the tenderness of the lunch meat, his voraciousness satisfying some kind of primal urge that would have normally required biting into flesh and blood and not merely a half- eaten sandwich.

He wanted more of the sandwich or anything soft and fleshy to chew on, but his stomach had grown full by the time he finished the sandwich, and there was nothing left in the fridge to stuff his mouth with. He simply returned to his bed to lie down again, and while lying there in the murky light, he remembered the Doors hit single Break on Through to the Other Side, and how “day destroys the night, and night divides the day,” as though he had been suddenly been repositioned to move to another side of reality, his identity as a human being uncertain, and his need to bite down hard into anything he could find both urgent and palpable. His oral fixation became so irritating that he had no choice but to don the clothes he wore the day before and venture off to the diner a few blocks from his apartment.

He walked hurriedly in an attempt to get there before irritation overtook him. He didn’t care how the sun shined or how the town tried to shrug off the harsh winter and steadily embarked towards a new spring. He didn’t care about the pedestrians who ambled passed him or the cars on the road that headed into work. He simply marched to the diner, a place he had never been to before, simply because he never had anyone to go with before.

When he arrived, he sat at the counter facing a black man with a white uniform on who worked the grill with his back towards him. The place was somewhat crowded with patrons catching their breakfasts before darting off to work. The cook plucked eggs from a stack of cardboard trays and worked with a precision and efficiency that Charlie soon admired. It was like looking into a fire. The cook’s spatula divided the frying eggs, omelets, and flapjacks into sections on the grill. A block of hash browns warmed against the grill’s hot, slick surface towards the back, while the eggs and pancakes were kept closer. The cook used a single twist of his wrist to crack open the egg shells as they spilled over the surface. He was like a puppeteer directing his marionettes, the orange yolks and its transparent ooze landing onto the grill unbroken, perfectly-shaped, and then quickly fluffing and turning opaque-white against the intense heat. The cook ran the flat edge of his long spatula underneath the simmering block of browning potatoes again and carefully flipped them over in a single turn without breaking them into any parts or fragments. He then moved over to the tin that stored the pancake batter. He meticulously dropped perfect ovals of heavy cream onto the grill, where these ovals then sizzled, thickened, and fluffed. His arms never stopped moving over his domain, as though he were a multi- appendaged Shiva breaking open the fragile egg shells, flipping over pancakes, and running the spatula below the block of hash browns all at the same time. The food became the chess pieces that paraded on his microcosmic board. The more food he dropped onto the grill, the more the waitress carted away, his spatula sliding his creations onto warm ceramic plates.

The waitress stacked the plates like shingles along the lengths of her pudgy arms. She walked briskly through the room and delivered them to patrons seated at the tables. It was grace-under-pressure reconfigured to fit the talents of a short-order cook and his better half—both of whom would forever remain unsung. It took several minutes of being mesmerized in this fashion before Charlie had the privilege of ordering his own meal. He had never been aware of such talent before, as mundane and unworldly as it may have seemed.

He ordered “The Triple Threat”, which included a bit of everything cooking on the grill. He waited patiently for the cook to run it through the same process. Charlie followed this cooking from its inchoate beginnings to its actualized end, and when the waitress placed the oversized meal in front of him, he finished the entire plate and still hungered for more. His appetite was so insatiable that he considered ordering a buttered blueberry muffin just to cap off the meal, like a desert normally would. But he was low on cash and thought it better to order another orange juice to wash the heavy meal down.

When he returned to his apartment sated like a beached whale, he collapsed onto his bed again and fell asleep for a few hours more, as there was nothing to do for the day anyway but to digest the enormous meal through the plumbing of his body. His body simply couldn’t stay awake during its gargantuan task of digestion. Everything about him had to shut down. When he awoke several hours later, he marveled at the python-sized coil at the bottom of his toilet—his shit so relieving that he felt emptied and cleansed of all the sinful gluttony the breakfast at the diner had brought. He was now poised and prepared to do nothing for the remainder of the afternoon, as eating dinner was the next major activity for a day that had nearly ended, save for more of the slumber normally reserved for kings, princes, and their illegitimate children. Charlie figured he’d order steak next and start the bewildering process all over again. The only real responsibility he had now was to attend the sex addicts meetings once a week, visit his probation officer once a week, take those pesky entrance exams for college, and eat plenty of comfort food to carry him through the vast stretch of boredom that now unfolded inch by hourly inch.

He remembered his old boss at the real estate office once telling him that boredom was a vice and that the best part of a good man’s life was to be engaged in some sort of enterprise that made standing still and getting nowhere at all bearable. It seemed reasonable to him that out of all of the work he performed at that small, shoddy real estate office, he really didn’t go anywhere at all, as his present circumstances now attested to, and that perhaps boredom and remaining in bed so much instead applying for any sort of work in the town was a type of sin that could corrupt his mind again into wanting women that he couldn’t have. But he soon made rituals out of the nothingness that unfolded each day.

He ate “The Triple Threat” breakfasts at the diner each morning, and he even bought a used textbook that explicated the college entrance exam that he was soon to take. The book itself had been published several years earlier, but Charlie figured that it was just as good. So after mornings spent eating at the diner, still mesmerized by the short-order cook and his elderly waitress, he returned home, slumbered soundly, ate lunch, slumbered soundly again, ate dinner, and then finally got to the task of reading the dreaded tome of a textbook that contained a variety of old practice tests that would hopefully slip him through the gates of the elite college in the center of town. It was unfortunate, then, that he could only look at the book for twenty minutes or so before returning to bed. But then the weekly sex addicts meeting would come, so there was at least that little pebble of occupation to keep him barely functioning as the summer approached.

He had attended so many meetings that it had gotten to the point where he felt like he was actually doing something with his life, and although this was but an illusion that hid the reality of how slow and insipid his life had become, it was still an illusion that was necessary. Never before had his pants become so uncomfortable to wear, as the weight around his mid-section piled on. Putting on his clothes became a daily struggle. He simply dismissed the idea of his gaining weight by thinking that the machines at the local Laundromat shrunk his clothes. Painful and burning boils slowly grew between his thighs. After several weeks of eating, sleeping, and cracking open the exam book in the middle of the night, his once-stickly figure had loosened into a pear-shape that he thought was the natural consequence of maturing and growing older. He figured that the weight gain was natural, as he now joined the ranks of millions who matured according to what everyday society demanded. A natural progression, he thought it was. Whether it was gobbling up all of the Oreo cookies at the sex addicts meetings, eating breakfasts and dinners at the diner, or buying pints of ice cream that sweetened his palette as he studied, he considered it all normal and well worth his time. The food replaced his discomfort. It made him feel better. It brought pleasure, as each meal became an event that filled the void. And granted that he really didn’t talk to many people during this time or make any friends out of the regulars at the diner, but he slowly began to feel less lonely and less bored as his waistline expanded. The meetings became more entertaining and his probation officer a little less caustic in her enforcement of every single rule that the courts had handed down. The probation officer, in fact, asked that he meet with her once every two weeks from now on. She was naturally convinced that Charlie no longer chased around girls or slept with prostitutes. She simply asked him a few routine questions when he did visit and then sheepishly dismissed him as though a newly-reinvented Charlie was no longer a threat to the innocence and vulnerabilities of the town’s young prostitutes.

Even LaShaun and Eliza at the meetings gave Charlie a little more slack. They figured his new pear shape and emerging double chin posed less of a threat, and so they actually smiled and encouraged him when he shared. Charlie was no longer a threat to anyone, it seemed, and he started to resemble that happy Buddha who soon grew a short beard and huffed and wheezed to meetings between studying for his entrance exams. Every week he purchased bits and pieces of a new wardrobe: polyester pants with elastic waists, super stretch shirts that hung like gowns over his mid-section, and loose cotton sweat-gear that could be worn both inside the home and out on the street. And he continued to enjoy filling himself with foods of all sorts—from “The Triple Threat” breakfasts, to ice cream in all assorted flavors, to wedges of frosted cakes that sat untouched in their display cases at the diner, to brief and sporadic rewards of chocolate candy bars that he thought he rightly deserved for walking so much—these were the foods that finally accompanied him to the local computer testing center three straight months of his new routine.

He stared into a computer screen as the terminal spat out hundreds of math and verbal questions, most of which had little or no resemblance to those in the exam book he studied from, and for some reason he wasn’t under the least bit of pressure or strain from answering these complicated questions. They flew by him, one by one, and he didn’t really care anymore how he answered them. They came at him like a video game would, his fingers eliminating each question like a spaceship does a space invader. He hardly noticed the time flying by, because no matter how Charlie had answered these questions, he was delighted by the experience of what the test-takers and the test-makers had already decided to be a grueling four-hour mindbender of a puzzle, and to Charlie, answering the questions correctly or incorrectly was of no consequence. Actually, the toughest parts of the test came when he felt the pangs of boredom once again, when the illusion of the test being a video game suddenly left him, only to double back and then realign himself with the enjoyable time he was having. Even the supervisor in the room looked at Charlie a bit askance, wondering why he smiled so much, because it must have broken all sorts of precedents. As far as Charlie was concerned, he was annihilating the questions one-by-one, capped off by a short essay where Charlie finally got to express how after years of chasing women he had finally begun to neglect them and would continue to do so for the rest of his known life.

When he left the test center, he felt like he had actually accomplished something and that he was finally going somewhere with his life. A momentary derailment was all that it took to put him on the right track instead of traveling down the routes that crashed him through the gates of hell, only that this new train he was on had plenty of snack cars and dining cars to accompany him on a vacation that had now become his every day life. He even found out that he was eligible for unemployment and other government subsidies that helped him pay the bills every month, as his bank account was now dangerously low. If it weren’t for Jerome from the meetings, he would have never known about these benefits. He shopped at the food banks and the local thrift stores that usually had clothing that fit him. He applied for food stamps.

The meetings he went to also took on a new quality. He actually liked going to them, as they served as one of the primary activities of the week. Surely Phil still shared about his masturbation problems, and Irving still fought his ongoing battle with the ASPCA and admitted that he had been eyeing a stray cat that fought in the neighborhood alleyways. Jerome still missed his wife and rejoiced over every day he had spent with her. He even visited her grave—not to dig up the corpse—but to put flowers next to the new marker he had purchased for her. This, he said, finally steered him back towards the living instead of the dead. Manuel even smiled a little more at the meetings, and he used his Spanish curse words less frequently. At one point, Charlie could have sworn he had heard him singing a Mexican ballad as opposed to ranting aimlessly in his Conquistador’s brogue. But what most delighted Charlie about these meetings was how LaShaun and Eliza finally forgave him for sleeping with all of the prostitutes, because now that his large belly provided more than enough shade for his lower extremities, he could no longer function as the kind of Hollywood pornographic wunderkind that loved to have sex. His libido had been channeled into serving the group. Things like arranging pizza parties in the church basement and organizing field trips became the spice of his days. Service work began to replace any drives that he once had for sex. He even arranged for the group to take a field trip to the local natural history museum, and he knew he was on the right track when he broke up a near-fight between Irving and Jerome at one of the museum’s exhibits of stuffed animals. Charlie deftly told Jerome to stop harassing Irving over his fascination with a replica of a wooly mammoth, and he preached about how important it was that they support each other. He even had Irving and Jerome shake hands, and Eliza and LaShaun began to gush over the new Charlie Zero and what a good man he had become as a result of the meetings he attended.

And even though his reinvention took several months of continuous meetings, visits to the probation office, and especially abstinence from any sex, it got to the point where Charlie had grown out of his lonely, cynical shell and emerged instead as a person ready to contribute to his society again by having close friends, finally applying to the elite college, and generally eating anything he could get his hands on. His waistline continued to grow, but it no longer mattered, because no longer was he so obsessed with women he could never have. Their complete absence from his life made him slowly forget about them, as such a forgetting was a true blessing. No longer did he complain about the women who were once so appealing, because he figured that they wouldn’t make very good matches anyway. He figured that such women were incapable of love in the truest sense of the word. They basically used up men like him, sucked them dry and cut them to shreds, simply because it was in their nature to do so. And while he didn’t resent these women at all, he began instead to feel somewhat sorry for them, because throughout their entire lives they would only be seen as sexual objects chased around by the masculine gaze, and there was really no way such beautiful women could get around this their most basic purpose. He even felt that his pursuit of their beauty would only weaken them in the long run. He found himself morally conflicted about desiring such women, because by having chased them so vigorously, he himself had a hand in making them incapable of experiencing true and healthy love. The models, the movie stars, and the hot women from the college would always be pursued like prey, and for a moment he actually felt some degree of shame for having pursued them that way. Multiply his pursuit to the tenth power, and that’s what most women who are considered beautiful by the masses have to deal with on a daily, ongoing basis. Charlie figured that he wouldn’t be able to step out of his apartment if such a misfortune had instead fallen upon him.

And as soon as his transformation became more identifiable to those who knew him, Charlie began to question whether he had loved the idea of being an alpha male who is able to seduce women at whim or had actually fallen in love with the women themselves who granted his requests and surrendered their bodies to him. Because if he had indeed been in love with the idea of being that veritable hero who constantly engages in the chivalrous and untrammeled pursuit of any woman with blonde hair and blue eyes—as opposed to loving these women and caring for their needs—then he had made a critical error in pursuing them. It may have been a total lapse in judgment, an innocent mistake, but a major one, because it had been his own manhood and the pursuit of that manhood that he had fallen in love with and not the women whom he used to test that manhood. It came as an unbelievable and startling claim to make against himself, because he was sure he had loved the prostitutes he slept with. He did want relationships with them, or so he thought. But he now wondered whether or not he slept with them just to be more of a man and pursue his sense of manhood with the abandon that every young loser covets. He may have been in love with both: the pursuit of Rapunzel in her tower and Rapunzel herself—two inseparable loves that he couldn’t quite reduce to a binary or zero-sum answer this way or that. He realized that he had been in love with both the pursuit and the women. And loving both had proved near-deadly and near-fatal. He considered himself lucky to be away from that fiery box of pain where such binary choices had to be made. He considered it a part of the past now—neither right nor wrong, with neither guilt nor regret—only tinkering with the notion that he may have erred and that he may not have erred at all, the ambiguity intriguing him but no longer potent enough to darken his day or stop him from once again visiting the diner before the sex addicts meetings. When he did so on a completely new day, he had a large slice of carrot cake and washed it down with a glass of whole milk. He then made his way to the church basement where all the men in the group waited for LaShaun and Eliza to arrive.

“I’ve seen the change in you,” said Phil all of a sudden.

“Yeah. I guess I’ve changed a little over the last year,” said Charlie.

“But now you’re putting on the pounds,” said Jerome. “You may be filling up with food instead of women.”

“It’s better,” said Phil. “The man is much happier.”

“All you need now is a good pet,” said Irving on the sly. “A good pet will make you forget you ever needed a woman.”

“Y’know, I kind if agree with Irving for some reason,” said Jerome, securing the hood on his sweatshirt.

“You do??”

“Yes, I do. Charlie deserves some companionship, and a dog or a cat would take his mind off things. Give him something to love.”

“Well, I guess there’s a first for everything,” said Charlie. “I never thought you two would agree on anything.”

“I’ve been reconsidering my stance on having pets, that’s all.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, but the difference is that I don’t want to sleep with them. That’s where we drawn the live, Irv.”

“And I’ve been rethinking my stance on sleeping with people who have passed on too, although I would never sleep with a dead body or anything like that.”

“It’s amazing,” said Charlie. “It’s the gifts of the program that Irving and Jerome actually agree on something.”

“Yeah, but not for long,” said Phil. “A lot of what you have, Charlie, is wishful thinking. Next we’ll be thinking that Manuel over there may one day speak English.”

They all stared at Manuel all of a sudden, and Manuel simply rolled his eyes in response.

“Nah,” said Charlie. “I think we wish for too much. We have to keep it simple and concentrate on staying away from the first sexual encounter, to prevent ourselves from acting out. Some things about ourselves we can’t change.”

“I don’t even whack off that much anymore,” said Phil. “Not nearly as much as I used to anyway.”

“That’s a gift. Really it is. It’s amazing how this program works. By the way, you guys want to go to the diner after this?”

“I’ll go with you,” said Jerome.

“I’ll go too,” said Phil. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

“Irving? Manuel?”

“Not tonight,” said Irving, “but thanks.”

And Manuel chose not to respond to Charlie’s invitation. “Okay, then,” said Charlie. “Now where are the two ladies?”

“Speak of the devils,” said Irving.

LaShaun and Eliza walked in as happy and buoyant as ever, almost like two marshmallows rolling into the basement carrying coffee mugs and smiling.

“Hello, gentlemen,” said LaShaun. “Sorry we’re a little on the late side.”

“Did you bring cookies? Charlie ate all the cookies again.”

“I’ll bring them next time,” she said. “We’ll have to do without for now.”

They settled into positions on the chairs, which took a little time since they had to untangle themselves from their coffees and fashionable handbags that were stuffed with items that most men would normally consider unnecessary. Charlie always wondered what women kept in their purses, because on several occasions, especially while sitting alone at Grealy’s, the pub down the street, he would sometimes glance into the wells of their pocketbooks to notice how unorganized and messy everything was inside, and yet the women seemed to fish out the exact item they needed without too much trouble—except, of course, if they needed to find that special document that could get their boyfriend out of jail, or their husband’s platinum credit card that had been maxed out and had suddenly gone missing, or some slip of paper that might prevent their boyfriend from being thrown off of a building by armed thugs. These things they just weren’t able to find, but anything that suit their own needs they found instantly, as though they had a special radar that found only those items that made them even more desirable and attractive to ruthless men.

And by the time Charlie had undergone six weeks of sex addicts meetings, even Eliza and LaShaun seemed attractive to him now, as though their group had all been shipwrecked on a remote island, and these were the only two women left, these same women whom God commanded to start a new race of human beings.

And the women did seem attractive to him. Call it being absent from the parade of hot college women that visited the pub. It was like he had been relocated to another planet far removed from the women who basically spit on him for liking them too much. He was glad they were out of the picture and that he didn’t have to see them anymore. A spacecraft had carried these ferocious women all away to possess the minds of the next army of suckers who would always try the same things he did to win them. How fortunate to have been stuck with Eliza and LaShaun instead. Their inner beauty had replaced their outer shells, as though they had been turned inside out during their six-week trek through sexual sobriety and now represented the same aesthetic beauty he had seen in the dreams he had.

For some reason he no longer cared what he looked like. He liked eating and would continue to do so until he couldn’t get out of bed anymore. It was a strange liberation that these meetings provided all of a sudden: the ability to go deeper than what the restrictions of his shallowness as a man allowed, especially when it came to his definition of what beauty was, because now it could be everything that he never noticed—how Irving was somehow beautiful for romancing his dog, or how Eliza’s spandex top made him want to plant his face into her acne-lined cleavage, or how he imagined having a threesome with both of the women. And then suddenly he remembered where he was and that his disease was taking over again—only now he was as big as a walrus. Because of his new shape, he would have physical problems having sex with anyone. Nevertheless, he hadn’t felt this good in a long time.

After reading the sex addicts preamble, LaShaun said, “a strange thing happened to me that I wanted to share with the group today. This morning I was on my way to Social Security when I saw a man who used to be my client. He didn’t look too good from what I saw. He had on those same, old, low-riding jeans and raggedy old shirt that he used to wear when he visited me. He actually looked like he’d been drinking a lot or smoking a lot of that reefer, because I know that he didn’t even recognize me when I walked past him out on Main Street today.

“But seeing him again brought my past all the way back into my present state of mind, and it made me realize how long my sobriety took, and how hard it was to stop acting out with other guys, especially since I was broke and usually filled that need by offering my vagina to other men—and believe me, that was my process for a while, and this raggedy man looking lost and confused on the street today brought it all back, and I could have acted out right there, but I got on the phone and called Eliza, and Eliza, bless her heart, had to talk me down and reminded me that yes, I’m a sex addict, and I have come way too far to be offering the raggedy man my vagina. I don’t need that man’s dick in here, and vice-versa, because I do not need to show him love that way anymore. And after I called Eliza, I came to this meeting, and this is how the process works.